Now THAT would be an awesome tattoo!

As a Canadian living in France for about four years now, let me give you an idea how Minitel has 'delayed' Internet technology over here... For $40 a month residential subscriber, I get... (adsl.free.fr) *) 20 Mbps downstream data (that is not a typo) *) Free *national*, local and discounted inbound calls *) Interactive cable TV (300 channels) *) Unified web-configurable voicemail and services *) Fancy ringtones to callers (on my FIXED line) *) ... Sure they had issues getting started, but now the French are up there with the Japanese and the South Koreans, thanks largely to aggressive local loop unbundling. And watch out on the UMTS/3G stuff. The licences may have hurt, but the take-up has been pretty agressive and is still ahead of NA CDMA both in terms of bandwidth and service sophistication.